Women, Family, and Ritual in Renaissance Italy

Women, Family, and Ritual in Renaissance Italy
Author: Christiane Klapisch-Zuber
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 354
Release: 1987-06-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0226439267

English translations of the author's most important articles.

Women, Family, and Ritual in Renaissance Italy

Women, Family, and Ritual in Renaissance Italy
Author: Christiane Klapisch-Zuber
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 354
Release: 1985
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780226439259

Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, a brilliant historian of the Annales school, skillfully uncovers the lives of ordinary Italians of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Tuscans in particular, young and old, rich, middle-class, and poor. From the extraordinarily detailed records kept by Florentine tax collectors and the equally precise ricordanze (household accounts with notations of events great and small), Klapisch-Zuber draws a living picture of the Tuscan household. We learn, for example, how children were named, how wet nurses were engaged, how marriages were negotiated and celebrated. A wealth of other sources are tapped—including city statutes, private letters, philosophical works on marriage, paintings—to determine the social status of women. Klapisch-Zuber reveals how women, in their roles as daughters, wives, sisters, and mothers, were largely subject to a family system that needed them but valued them little.

Art and Love in Renaissance Italy

Art and Love in Renaissance Italy
Author: Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, N.Y.)
Publisher: Metropolitan Museum of Art
Total Pages: 394
Release: 2008
Genre: Art del Renaixement
ISBN: 1588393003

"Many famous artworks of the Italian Renaissance were made to celebrate love, marriage, and family. They were the pinnacles of a tradition, dating from early in the era, of commemorating betrothals, marriages, and the birth of children by commissioning extraordinary objects - maiolica, glassware, jewels, textiles, paintings - that were often also exchanged as gifts. This volume is the first comprehensive survey of artworks arising from Renaissance rituals of love and marriage and makes a major contribution to our understanding of Renaissance art in its broader cultural context. The impressive range of works gathered in these pages extends from birth trays painted in the early fifteenth century to large canvases on mythological themes that Titian painted in the mid-1500s. Each work of art would have been recognized by contemporary viewers for its prescribed function within the private, domestic domain."--BOOK JACKET.

Law, Family, and Women

Law, Family, and Women
Author: Thomas Kuehn
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 430
Release: 2015-08-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 0226457656

Focusing on Florence, Thomas Kuehn demonstrates the formative influence of law on Italian society during the Renaissance, especially in the spheres of family and women. Kuehn's use of legal sources along with letters, diaries, and contemporary accounts allows him to present a compelling image of the social processes that affected the shape and function of the law. The numerous law courts of Italian city-states constantly devised and revised statutes. Kuehn traces the permutations of these laws, then examines their use by Florentines to arbitrate conflict and regulate social behavior regarding such issues as kinship, marriage, business, inheritance, illlegitimacy, and gender. Ranging from one man's embittered denunciation of his father to another's reaction to his kinsmen's rejection of him as illegitimate, Law, Family, and Women provides fascinating evidence of the tensions riddling family life in Renaissance Florence. Kuehn shows how these same tensions, often articulated in and through the law, affected women. He examines the role of the mundualdus—a male legal guardian for women—in Florence, the control of fathers over their married daughters, and issues of inheritance by and through women. An ambitious attempt to reformulate the agenda of Renaissance social history, Kuehn's work will be of value to both legal anthropologists and social historians. Thomas Kuehn is professor of history at Clemson University.

Family and Gender in Renaissance Italy, 1300–1600

Family and Gender in Renaissance Italy, 1300–1600
Author: Thomas Kuehn
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 405
Release: 2017-03-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108138594

This book studies family life and gender broadly within Italy, not just one region or city, from the fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries. Paternal control of the household was paramount in Italian life at this time, with control of property and even marital choices and career paths laid out for children and carried out from beyond the grave by means of written testaments. However, the reality was always more complex than a simple reading of local laws and legal doctrines would seem to permit, especially when there were no sons to step forward as heirs. Family disputes provided an opening for legal ambiguities to redirect property and endow women with property and means of control. This book uses the decisions of lawyers and judges to examine family dynamics through the lens of law and legal disputes.

Changing Patrons: Social Identity and the Visual Arts in Renaissance Florence

Changing Patrons: Social Identity and the Visual Arts in Renaissance Florence
Author:
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 304
Release:
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780271048147

To whom should we ascribe the great flowering of the arts in Renaissance Italy? Artists like Botticelli and Michelangelo? Or wealthy, discerning patrons like Cosimo de' Medici? In recent years, scholars have attributed great importance to the role played by patrons, arguing that some should even be regarded as artists in their own right. This approach receives sharp challenge in Jill Burke's Changing Patrons, a book that draws heavily upon the author's discoveries in Florentine archives, tracing the many profound transformations in patrons' relations to the visual world of fifteenth-century Florence. Looking closely at two of the city's upwardly mobile families, Burke demonstrates that they approached the visual arts from within a grid of social, political, and religious concerns. Art for them often served as a mediator of social difference and a potent means of signifying status and identity. Changing Patrons combines visual analysis with history and anthropology to propose new interpretations of the art created by, among others, Botticelli, Filippino Lippi, and Raphael. Genuinely interdisciplinary, the book also casts light on broad issues of identity, power relations, and the visual arts in Florence, the cradle of the Renaissance.

Tuscans and Their Families

Tuscans and Their Families
Author: David Herlihy
Publisher:
Total Pages: 404
Release: 1985
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780300046113

An analysis of the survey of Tuscan households undertaken in Florence in 1427, finding the population close to its late-medieval nadir. Evaluating the factors that shaped domestic life, this book is a rich new source of information on the social history of an important era and a major contribution to historical demography. This abridged translation of a work first published in France in 1978 includes an updated bibliography.

Images and Identity in Fifteenth-century Florence

Images and Identity in Fifteenth-century Florence
Author: Patricia Lee Rubin
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 456
Release: 2007-01-01
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780300123425

An exploration of ways of looking in Renaissance Florence, where works of art were part of a complex process of social exchange Renaissance Florence, of endless fascination for the beauty of its art and architecture, is no less intriguing for its dynamic political, economic, and social life. In this book Patricia Lee Rubin crosses the boundaries of all these areas to arrive at an original and comprehensive view of the place of images in Florentine society. The author asks an array of questions: Why were works of art made? Who were the artists who made them, and who commissioned them? How did they look, and how were they looked at? She demonstrates that the answers to such questions illuminate the contexts in which works of art were created, and how they were valued and viewed. Rubin seeks out the meeting places of meaning in churches, in palaces, in piazzas--places of exchange where identities were taken on and transformed, often with the mediation of images. She concentrates on questions of vision and visuality, on "seeing and being seen." With a blend of exceptional illustrations; close analyses of sacred and secular paintings by artists including Fra Angelico, Fra Filippo Lippi, Filippino Lippi, and Botticelli; and wide-ranging bibliographic essays, the book shines new light on fifteenth-century Florence, a special place that made beauty one of its defining features.

Nuns' Chronicles and Convent Culture in Renaissance and Counter-Reformation Italy

Nuns' Chronicles and Convent Culture in Renaissance and Counter-Reformation Italy
Author: K. J. P. Lowe
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 466
Release: 2003-12-04
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780521621915

This well-illustrated and innovative book analyses convent culture in sixteenth-century Italy through the medium of three unpublished nuns' chronicles. It uses a comparative methodology of 'connected differences' to examine the intellectual and imaginative achievement of these nuns, and to investigate how they fashioned and preserved individual and convent identities by writing chronicles. The chronicles themselves reveal many examples of nuns' agency, especially with regard to cultural creativity, and show that convent traditions determined cultural priorities and specialisms, and dictated the contours of convent ceremonial life.